


The Kids Aren't Alright

by ussnicole



Series: Welcome to Suburbia [5]
Category: The Offspring
Genre: Angst, Depression, First Person, Gen, Oneshot, Songfic, Suburbia, Suicide, Teenage Pregnancy, drug usage, the kids aren't alright, the offspring - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-10
Updated: 2017-11-10
Packaged: 2019-01-31 10:23:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12679947
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ussnicole/pseuds/ussnicole
Summary: Welcome to the jungle.





	The Kids Aren't Alright

**_When we were young the future was so bright_ **

Kids, racing down the street as school lets out. Windy fall days, jumping in piles of leaves and skinning knees. Growing and hoping and dreaming of becoming famous athletes, astronauts, ballerinas. Hope and aspirations alive and well, bright eyed boys and girls attending school because they like it, not because it is the law.

**_Now the neighborhood’s cracked and torn_ **

Gunshots echo in the night; the streets aren’t safe past dark. The once well-kept streets have fallen into disrepair, and if you hit the pothole on Sebring just right, you’ll ruin your tires. The kids are in high school now, sneaking out of their houses to spray paint the underpass on East 12th Street and have sex in cars parked on Lover’s Lane in the mountains.

**_Fragile lives, shattered dreams_ **

Jamie Ferguson: top of the graduating class of 8th grade, honors student, perfect child. Dropped out of high school junior year, has a two year old daughter and another on the way. Her boyfriend is nowhere to be found.

Mark Ignacio: class clown, prankster, and friend to all. Graduates high school and takes a gap year – and then another. And another. No job, no life, lives at home. Plays guitar and smokes pot to ignore what could have been.

Jay Williams: editor of the high school newspaper, top English student, accepted to Yale and Harvard. Hangs himself in his closet just before graduation. His abusive father finds him two days after he has killed himself. No one knew anything was wrong.

Brandon Powell: captain of the football team, most popular boy in school, notorious ladies’ man. OD’s on heroin and dies in the bathroom of a gas station on the outskirts of town. The steroids he takes to further his football career lead into harder drugs after graduation and he never sees the field in college. The acceptance letters from Notre Dame and University of Alabama lay on the kitchen table, painful reminders of a life wasted.

**_The cruelest dream, reality_ **

I got out of Suburbia alive, and when I came back, this is what I found. The streets I grew up on, the streets that raised me and taught me some of the most important lessons in my life have swallowed the lives of the people I knew.

I am leaving tomorrow, and I will not ever come back.


End file.
